DEADtime TV: Week of August 10

Hey DEADheads, Ryne from The Moon is a Dead World here with another week of DEADtime TV. Your horror favorites are all back, except for Dominion, but screw that show anyway. Shawn’s got True Blood, and is currently marathoning the current season of Falling Skies, so look for a recap soon.Kevin‘s got Teen Wolf, The Strain, and Under the Dome, and I’ve got the rest!

The Last Ship: “Two Sailors Walk Into a Bar…” – Sunday, August 10 at 9 PM

Besides the bad joke of the title (“Two sailors walk into a bar… they both walk out”), this episode of The Last Ship is a surprisingly effective hour of television. Not only does it put CO Chandler and Dr. Scott in danger, it also finally focuses most of its plot on the virus that has been plaguing the world, the one we’ve been hearing a lot about but never really see. It’s a needed change of pace for the show, especially since it’s entering the home stretch for this season.

“Two Sailors Walk Into a Bar” picks up right where “SOS” left off; Chandler and Tex are pulled up into a helicopter navigated by the Russians, then whisked off to their ship as hostages so that Ruskov can use them as a bargaining chip for Dr. Scott. Chandler and Tex are given the ultimatum: either they get Dr. Scott, or they die.

Not much of a choice, right? But Dr. Scott volunteers to head over, because she thinks she’s figured out the vaccine. She believes she’s no longer useful, so it doesn’t matter if she gets killed. I’d disagree, seeing as she needs to make another, oh, 200 tons of vaccine for the world, but whatever you say, The Last Ship! Scott is sent over to prove to Ruskov she’s found the vaccine at last, but she runs into the American scientist Ruskov is using to research the vaccine.

That scientist had mutated the genomes in the vaccine by trying to use his own genes to create a cure – instead, it created a worse virus and made the scientist a carrier. Dr. Scott still has a vaccine, although it’s a crapshoot whether it will really work. But they don’t have to worry about that, because Slattery makes the right decision to send some troops out to rescue everyone and blow up Ruskov’s ship.

Unlike most other episodes of The Last Ship, there are stakes involved in “Two Sailors Walk Into a Bar.” And the central focus on the virus and vaccine is really the first we’ve seen. Now that Ruskov’s ship has been destroyed, it seems that Chandler’s USS Nathan James really is the last ship out there now.

This episode feels like it could efficiently wrap this season, though, so I’m not sure where the show goes from here in its final two episodes. In general, I’m always kind of confused how The Last Ship will be able to continue into multiple seasons with its fairly limited plot, but we’ll soon see where this season takes us. Perhaps the last ship will be a health center, traveling along the high seas and spreading the vaccine to everyone who needs it. Or maybe the Americans will just bang their fists on their chests and strap the vaccine to eagles.

True Blood: “Almost Home” – Sunday, August 10 at 9 PM

This week’s episode of True Blood is titled “Almost Home”, and we really are. This is the eighth episode of the 10-episode final season of the show, so things are wrapping up, and coming to a close, for good. I’ve made known that I wasn’t thrilled with the last couple of seasons of the show, to the point that I was ready for it to come to an end. This last season, however, they stepped their game up, and now I’m sad to see it go. Though, they’ve done such a good job of sending the show out, as relevant as it was when it premiered, that I’m many people are going to be left with a hole in their heart. Certainly a hole in their summertime TV schedule. This episode begins with Sarah, still holed-up at the old Soldiers of the Sun barracks. She peers out the window, and she sees the Yakua soldiers, as well as Eric and Pam, and she ventures out, asking for them to killer so that she can return as the Princess of peace. Eric is having trouble controlling his rage, she he almost obliges her request. Instead, he bits her, sucks some of her blood, and laughs as he can feel the Hep-V being destroyed within his body. Suddenly, Eric is cured, and they know that Sarah most certainly has the cure for the disease hidden in her blood.

Sookie and Bill are still laying in bed together, and Bill begins to apologize for bringing nothing but darkness to her life. To which, Sookie quickly corrects him and reminds him of the love that he gave her, and how it would be impossible for him to make her feel that way if all that he brought to the table was darkness. Sookie and Bill, of course, are unaware of the new-found cure. Lafayette is with Lettie Mae at her old house, digging in the yard that Tara was digging in when they went on their last V-blood trip. Lettie Mae convinces Reverend Daniels to consume some V-blood, so that he can see what she sees, and understand exactly what she’s trying to do. He does, and then he sees Tara and is astonished that it wasn’t something made up by an addict. The three follow the ghostly vision of Tara into the old house(which new people live in now, by the way) and they are treated to a vision from the past, a birthday party for Tara. Sookie and Lafayette are both present, when in walks Tara’s abusive father. He blows up about the fact that a birthday party is being had with his money, and he starts roughing Lettie Mae up, looking for his Gun. Tara has hidden the gun, and brings it out, points it at her father while he’s roughing her mother up, but decides instead of shooting him, she’s going to bury the gun in the back yard. Shortly thereafter, we see Tara’s father running out of the house, claiming he is done, leaving Lettie Mae to raiser her all by herself. When the three find the gun buried in the yard, Tara tells her mother she’s sorry that she didn’t pull the trigger. Lettie May then tells her that that wasn’t on her. The two have a touching moment, and Tara disappears into the night. I guess she really is dead.

Jason gets a text from Violet, with pictures showing Jessica, Adilyn and Wade tied up in a dungeon. He contacts Andy, but he’s 50 miles away, so he tells him to go get his daughter fro him. Jason has an unwanted passenger, though, as Hoyt and his new wife are arguing, and she insists that she is going with Jason. When he shows up to the house, he is ambushed by Violet, that ties him up as she explains to him that nobody leaves her, that she has brought ruthless dictators to their knees with a simple glance, and that she’s not one that gets rejected. As she’s about to make waste of everyone in the room, a bullet comes from seemingly nowhere, as Hoyt enters the room and shoots Violet in the heart, turning her into a pit-of-mush. Hoyt is still glamoured, so Jessica is having a hard time with the feels coming back, but not being able to address any of the things she would like to say to Hoyt.

Eric shows up at Sookie’s house, and she realizes that he’s been cured. She tells him about Bill, about how he’s dying, and that the virus is accelerating at a quicker pace because of her blood, and begs him to help Bill out because he doesn’t have much time yet. She is not satisfied with the “i’ll be back” answer, as he vanishes into the night, promising to return the next night. She follows him back to Fangtasia, which turns out to be a mistake, as the entire place is crawling with trigger-happy Yakua, guarding their profitable Hep-V cure in the basement of the club. Eric pretends to glamour Sookie, to help her get out alive, but even then Gus Jr. still suspects something else is going on. Jason is having breakfast at the diner, when Hoyt shows up. He tells him how since last night, he hasn’t been able to get Jessica out of his head. Eventually it’s going to come out that he had a relationship with her, and had it glamoured away, and it’s not going to be good, but for now, even though he can’t remember being with her, his feelings for her still remain. He drops by her house to leave her a note, and she hears him, so she invites him in to talk. They have an awkward conversation where she does her best to pussyfoot around the fact that they were once lovers, and then he leaves.

Sookie, after realizing that the cure to Hep-V is locked in the basement of Fangtasia, heads back to Bill’s house so that she and Jessica can get him up, and down to the club so that he can drink her blood and be cured of the disease. Gus Jr. already suspects something going on, so even though he’s heading out of town for a couple of days, he leaves his Yakuza henchmen behind to guard his cash-cow. Sookie, despite being told multiple times by Eric that he will come to her, breaks into the basement while Eric and Pam are trying to take a sample of Sarah’s blood to cure Bill. For whatever reason, mostly because this is a TV Drama, Bill refuses to drink the blood, hence refusing the cure. This is where the episode ends, so we have no idea why yet, but I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that he would be getting cured, while leaving thousands of other vampires to still suffer and die from the disease. I think it’s pretty clear that he and all other vampires are going to be cured eventually, but we won’t know until next week, or possibly even the finale which airs the week after. Until then.

The Lottery: “Genie” – Sunday, August 10 at 10 PM

“I’m a genie in a bottle, you gotta rub me the right way,” Christina Aguilera crooned back in 1999. And right now, The Lottery is not rubbing me right. The show is so self-serious that it fails to recognize the cheesiness inherent in its approach to a world that is infertile. It refuses to run with the humor; it wants everyone to get sucked into its dystopian world where people are clamoring to get pregnant.

But for now, “Genie” gives us more of the same; it’s the same political strivings for the president to get his numbers up, the secret talks behind closed doors, the deceit and corruption of the higher-ups. All of it is just so thick and heavy, it’s like a cloying mist seeping out of a magic lamp.

Take, for instance, this week’s scene with the main corrupted man in government, Darius Hayes. He confronts James, a scientist working with Alison on the 100 fertilized embryos, in an abandoned parking lot at night, asking him to please come to him if Alison is able to fertilize any more eggs. Don’t trust anyone with this, he says! Only tell me, a man who corners you in a dark place and menacingly attempts to commandeer you. Sure, that guy’s a good person to trust.

It’s weird, because The Lottery seems like it’s not even trying to hide Darius’ evilness from the others. They’re just not picking up on it. Maybe next time they’ll get him to grow a pencil-thin mustache and twiddle it with his fingers – that’ll learn ’em.

Likewise, this week we get to see the special housing area where the Department of Humanity is keeping Kyle’s son Elvis. If the weird, pseudo-futuristic buildings don’t give you the creeps, then the joyless way that the scientists talk about taking care of the new 100 babies and monitoring the mothers at all times will. It’s here where the overwhelming seriousness of the situation causes The Lottery to be unintentionally funny – don’t they realize that all of this posturing is cheesy?

The lottery still hasn’t begun yet, but we’re finally finding out about some of the other characters. Kyle has a wife, and she returns because he needs her to claim Elvis or else he’ll be kept at the Department of Humanity. Vanessa has a brother, and they were both orphans. The president has a wife. It’s all rudimentary, but hey, they’ve gotta do something in these hour-long episodes where nothing really happens.

The most important aspect of “Genie” is its reveal that those people who were able to reproduce after the infertility crisis were injected with an empty bubonic plague husk, giving us the assumption that the infertility epidemic was most likely a virus, and some were intentionally inoculated. This will most likely be revealed next week, but it’s fairly obvious to the viewer, even when the top scientists continue to run around going, “D’oh, this seems weird but I don’t get why!”

Hopefully The Lottery manages to rub me right next week or else watching this show will quickly turn into the same excruciating pain as Bitten. (Oh yeah, Genelle Williams is in both!)

The Strain: “Runaways” – Sunday, August 10 at 10 PM

This week’s new episode of ‘The Strain’ marks the fifth episode in the first season and the series as a whole and is titled ‘Runaways. The episode begins with Gabe, our rock star and one of the initial “survivors” of the flight as his manager Ruby leads an urologist to his room upstairs where he’s been hiding away. After delivering her to him and walking off, Ruby hears screaming and struggling and rushes back. As she returns, she finds Gabe attacking the doctor and in a desperate attempt to save herself, she runs out of the house and into a cab in order to make a call for help and save her own skin in the process.

The episode focuses largely on Eph and Abraham as they join forces to go out and rid the population as best they can of this new menace that is efficiently making its way throughout the New York area. Eventually Eph decides that he must do what is right in his mind, which is talking to head of the CDC after attaining viable proof of what is occurring here, in the hopes of being granted permission to construct a quarantine area. Abraham must also do what he feels is right, which is eliminating every possible threat.

The episode also provides a number of flashbacks which provide us with some insight as to how Abraham first discovered this creature, back when he was a child in a containment camp so many years ago. Meanwhile Nora struggles with her mother after splitting ways with Eph, the other survivors continue to try and figure out what’s happening to them and Vasiliy gets his first glance at what is really going on and possibly causing the weird activity from the rats as of late.

Now that so much of the exposition and introduction is out of the way, ‘The Strain’ continues to deliver, only now with what is becoming a much faster pace. Elements are starting to really get underway and things should only continue to build in this fashion from this point on. I could not love the show more at this point and am quite impressed with the selections for casting too as almost everyone seems to fit incredibly well into what I would imagine from the novels. I can’t wait to see what the series brings next week and it’s great to hear FX has also officially renewed the series for a second season. I look forward to seeing you all back here again next week for our continued DEADtime coverage of the show.

‘The Strain’ is currently airing its first season Sunday’s at 10:PM on FX.

The Leftovers: “Solace for Tired Feet” – Sunday, August 10 at 10 PM

The Leftovers returns to its normal narrative in “Solace for Tired Feet,” coming back to the Garveys and their quest for normalcy. First up is Kevin, doing his best to keep the town together now after his father escapes from the local mental hospital. Kevin has also been seeing Nora for the past few months, and they’re ready to cement the relationship – if you know what I mean.

The episode also spends a hefty amount of time with Kevin’s son Tom, who is trying to protect Wayne’s baby at all costs. It doesn’t help that Wayne never checks in with him anymore, and the baby is almost due; when Tom is asked to deliver a wad of cash to another person with another Asian baby mommy just like Tom’s, he’s pushed to the breaking point.

If “Solace for Tired Feet” shows us anything after coming back from such a strong Nora-centric episode, it’s that The Leftovers is best left digging around in one storyline. This episode pushes each narrative a bit too far, coming up short in areas that it could have excelled at had there been more time to spend. Juggling Kevin’s arc with Tom’s isn’t so difficult, but attempting to work the other major/minor characters in – Jill’s existential brush with death and Grandpa, Laurie’s attempt to mask any feelings towards Kevin’s new romance – leaves this episode grasping to keep everything together.

Not that it’s a bad episode, mind you. Kevin and Nora’s relationship is interesting, especially since the show has decided to skip all the introductory stuff. And watching Kevin melt down at everyone because of his nervousness over his father’s escape is tense. “Solace for Tired Feet” presents quite a few new entries in the mystery of The Leftovers, and while it doesn’t specifically answer them, it sets them forth as secrets the characters must uncover as well.

Like Tom, for instance. There’s nothing like finding out your sole quest for Wayne, the most important thing you can do, is something many other people are doing for him as well. That’s a deep betrayal, and The Leftovers gives that to us without saying much else about it. Obviously that’s going to piss some people off, but if you’re willing to roll with it, it introduces some interesting dilemmas.

The same is true of Kevin’s father, who we rarely understand besides his schizophrenic break. But in this episode, he actually does something: he gives Kevin a clue, a new lead in his psychosis. It’s a National Geographic magazine, whatever that means, but it’s Kevin’s first step. Whatever lies behind it isn’t clear, and Kevin’s not sure if he’s going crazy himself yet. But there’s evidence that maybe The Leftovers will start clearing some stuff up.

Yet the problem inherent in this episode of many reveals is that things get dropped very quickly in favor of following these two leads. The opening’s game with Jill is just that – a game to introduce Kevin’s father. It doesn’t make a reappearance, and so doesn’t feel as significant as it should. The same with the Guilty Remnant, because they’re relegated to a quick appearance and then drop out altogether.

There’s a risk that The Leftovers takes every week, that the many plot lines running throughout the show get dropped every so often to make room for others. It’s something that the show can’t afford to do all the time, because if so, the complexity diminishes – the audience sees through the facade and knows that not everything can be juggled. It’s up to Damon Lindelof to figure out what needs to be completed before new things can begin, and in “Solace for Tired Feet,” there’s too much baggage to carry it all.

Teen Wolf: “Time of Death” – Monday, August 11 at 10 PM

This week’s new episode of ‘Teen Wolf’ marks the eighth episode in the fourth season of the series and is titled ‘Time of Death’. The episode begins with Stiles having trouble sleeping with Malia gone and a flashback of him remembering their initial shared bed and him being the little spoon which was mentioned previously but not shown. We then immediately jump to Scott’s father making his official report involving the incident where he saved Stiles from the assassin at the school.

The episode focuses largely on Scott and his packs desperate attempt to find out who the Benefactor is. In a risky move, they put Scott to the point of appearing legally dead and then use Mr. Argent to report on having killed Scott. Their hope is that this will lure out the Benefactor personally and reveal who they are as they will surely want to confirm the kill for such a large value target. While the time in which they are able to revive Scott begins to run out, they must decide what to do if the Benefactor doesn’t show and how long they dare wait before trying to revive Scott. Scott meanwhile is having dreams while in this condition of different scenarios in which Liam tries to tell Scott to embrace his nature, likely trying to hint at something else. At the same time, Malia searches out Peter in the hopes of finding some answers to all of her questions and not knowing where else to go in order to do so.

We’re now three quarters of the way into the fourth season and it continues to deliver in every way, teasing us with the mystery of the benefactor’s identity, clashes occurring inside the pack as a result of new revelations. Everything is building up to what will surely be another crazy last fourth of the season and as the series has continually proven that it’s not afraid to kill off key characters, who knows what could happen in the last four episodes. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how things go down and I hope the rest of the fellow ‘Teen Wolf’ fans will continue to check back here each week for our continuing DEADtime coverage of the series.

The fourth season of ‘Teen Wolf’ is currently airing Monday’s at 10:PM on MTV.

Under the Dome: “Going Home” – Monday, August 11 at 10 PM

This week’s new episode of ‘Under the Dome’ is the seventh episode of the shows sophomore season and is titled ‘Going Home. The episode begins with Barbie being startled awake by the memory of what happened in the cave. Realizing they have no choice, he and Julia inform Junior and the rest of the kids (or the hands if you will) that Sam was the one who killed Angie and that he is now dead himself, Barbie having seen the proof. Unable to believe the truth about his uncle, Junior storms out and Barbie realizes the only way he will be able to prove this to everyone and be able to move on is to venture down into the cave that Sam jumped into in order to retrieve the body so that they can see the scratches Angie left on him. Once in the cave, Barbie’s climbing gear starts being tugged and he cuts the rope in order to save Julia and Rebecca, himself falling into the darkness.

The episode largely focuses on the realization that this newly created cave has the potential to get people out of the dome. Barbie himself suddenly arrives in his hometown after falling into the darkness and we soon realize Sam is here as well, on his way to confront his sister who left him thinking she was dead all these years. Barbie on the other hand heads home and is confronted by his old military team who try to force him to do a dirty job, although all he cares about his getting back inside the dome again. At the same time, those left in the dome have no clue what is going on and where this cave leads and Julia refuses to believe Barbie is dead, but all evidence is starting to lead to that conclusion. In a last desperate attempt she enlists the help of Joe to send a drone down the cave in the hopes of finding out where the tunnel drop goes beyond the darkness.

After a season that so far has been fairly lackluster (excluding the season premiere) in my opinion, this episode just succeeded in bringing me back on board in a big way. The introduction of the cave leading out of the dome and some very new and highly entertaining elements being introduced, I’m finding myself truly enthralled with this series for the first time since last season and I can honestly say that I cannot wait to see where things go next week following this revelation. I hope the fellow fans enjoyed this little twist as much as I did and I hope to see you all back here once again next week.

The second season of ‘Under The Dome’ is currently airing Monday’s at 10:PM on CBS.

Next week, we’re close to a couple of season finales, but we don’t lose anything yet. We’ll be adding a few new shows in September, so stay tuned!